Time

I've been thinking about time. About how I use it and abuse it, let it slide past or try to make the most of it. I think about how, although I am eating up time, taking bites of it, nibbles, for this purpose or that, time itself will one day swallow me whole. And not only me, but all that I know and love. 

Time itself will always hold us, solidly present in each moment that ever was, like rings in a great grandmother tree, and yet we will each eventually be buried deep in her core and the story on the surface of time will be new and unknown to us, and we unknown to it. We will still be part of time, we will, in fact, have been the creators of what will come, but the hours when we could make a difference, when we could write our small but important chapter, will be gone. We will have joined the audience of ancestors, watching, reading, as the universe continues unfolding, moment by moment.

I worry about how I use that time. I worry about about my small personal contribution, the teensy tiny word that will be my addition to the story. Will I be a noun? A verb? A simple comma between thoughts? I want the word to be a useful one, I want it to encapsulate all that I am, even if I still don't know myself which word to choose. How many words can I write? How much time do I have left to find them all?

I worry about how we are all using time, using it as if it belonged solely to each of us individually, not understanding that we are all one piece of work together. I am afraid that the most enlightened among us are hijacking the plot, and sending us all forward into an apocalyptic grand finale. Time herself is not worried, time will survive. But will humanity survive? Will our small and beautiful branch of it hold fast, growing green in the spring times and blazing golden in the autumns? I fear for our time.

I stumbled upon this photo the other day. It is my youngest son, William. I think he's eight years old in this photo? He's sitting on the foundation of my grandmother's farmhouse, the house now gone (although the garage still peeks out of the tree tops in the background), trees growing inside where I once sat at a long oak table with my grandmother, my great aunt, my sisters, mother, uncles, cousins. 

All those people are spread across the globe now, or seated with the ancestors themselves. That small transluscent globe next to him is undoubtedly a rain drop on the lens, it was a drizzling, windy afternoon. It is undoubtedly a rain drop, but I think of it as my grandmother, who William never had the opportunity to meet in life. I imagine she took that moment to visit with him from my past, from his past. It reminds me that we are bound, each to the other and all of us to this world that cradles us, who mothers us even in our times of folly. And this world, spinning in space while we dance upon her, is nestled in the branches of time, who holds us all.